1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a piezoelectric element including a first electrode, a piezoelectric body layer, and a second electrode, and a liquid ejecting head and a liquid ejecting apparatus, which have the piezoelectric elements.
2. Related Art
As a piezoelectric element used in a liquid ejecting head, there is a piezoelectric element which is constituted by interposing a piezoelectric material having an electromechanical conversion function, for example, a piezoelectric body layer made of a crystallized dielectric material, between two electrodes. The piezoelectric body layer is constituted by, for example, crystallized piezoelectric ceramics. As the piezoelectric ceramics, there is known a composite oxide which has a perovskite type crystal structure and can be expressed by the chemical formula ABO3.
Also, as the piezoelectric element which is mounted in an ink jet type recording head, for example, there is a piezoelectric element which is formed by forming a uniform piezoelectric material layer over the entire surface of a vibration plate by film-formation technology and cutting the piezoelectric material layer into a shape corresponding to a pressure generation chamber by a lithography method so as to be independent for every pressure generation chamber (for example, JP-A-2003-152233, JP-A-2004-42287, JP-A-2006-286925, and JP-A-2007-288123).
However, even if the piezoelectric body layer is composed of columnar crystals, the columnar crystals can obliquely grow, so that there is a possibility that the crystallinity of the piezoelectric body layer is deteriorated, and thus the piezoelectric properties are lowered. Therefore, there is a demand to improve the piezoelectric properties by forming a piezoelectric body layer having more complete columnar crystals.
Further, such a problem similarly exists in the piezoelectric elements mounted in other apparatuses as well as that of the liquid ejecting head typified by the ink jet type recording head.